Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

I don’t play much Call Of Duty any more. My feelings about the series have settled back from self-righteous fury over its Pentagon-sponsored war-fellating to a quieter, regretful sense that there have maybe been enough Call Of Duty games now, and that it would be nice if we could fill that infamous late October/early November release slot with, I don’t know, games about witches instead, or maybe just turn it into a public holiday and spend the week lying on a mattress regarding the ceiling. Still: I’ve skinned and filleted enough COD in my time to know that Black Ops 6‘s new “omnimovement” system is going to ruffle as many feathers as it smooths. The short version is that it turns you into Max Payne.

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Cinematic platformer Bionic Bay opens on a scene of a very large egg doing very bad things – easily my third favourite genre of speculative fiction. You awake to a world of tree trunks that twist like viscera and corroded contraptions powered by luminous goop that’s stored in the balls, uh, big glass orbs. A beam of light soon fills your character with newfound vigour, which is a nice moment of triumph in what otherwise feels like a deeply oppressive rust pit, all unsteady platforms and jagged pipes.

It doesn’t take long before you start spotting examples of the reason Bionic Bay went viral earlier this week. Above your head hangs a painstakingly detailed mass of vents and cables, looming lifelike with dust and shadow and history. I stood and stared because I’d seen how the sausage was made, but I like to think I would have lingered longer than usual anyway. It really is just that impressive.

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What is it with monstrous eating mechanics in games of late? Last week it was carnivorous post-Soviet elevators, now it’s retro fantasy RPGs that devour themselves. In Super Dungeon Muncher, you are a teeny-tiny hero navigating a corridor-shaped map full of fireball traps and crumbling platforms, spinning coins and patrolling critters. That’s the “Super Dungeon” part. The “Muncher” part refers to the corpulent red monster guzzling the whole level in your wake.

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Every so often, the fine folk of Resetera take a break from their usual schedule of complaining that video games journalists get all their news from Resetera, and post a Thing Of Beauty. For example: it’s thanks to Resetera member AstralSphere that I know about Alistair Aitcheson’s Magic Box and BizHawk retro emulation tools, which – amongst other things – allow you to play old Sonic the Hedgehog games in giddy parallel, shuffling between them whenever you collect a ring.

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The monst! The monst are back! Whoo-hoo! We’re still a while off from the TBC 2025 release date of haute-couture-asaurus RPG Monster Hunter Wilds, and Capcom have finally graced us with some delicious Actual Details, following the previous cinematic trailers. These come in the form of three short videos uploaded today on the official Monster Hunter channel, detailing the basics, focus mode, and the great sword’s moveset.

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As reported by Gematsu yesterday, SEGA have filed a trademark in Japan for the term “Yakuza Wars”. This happened on July 26th, and while Gematsu speculate this might be related to the next game in the Yakuza: Like A Dragon series, I have other plans. For the imaginary game. That I have nothing to do with.

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One of the neat things about Norland‘s fantasy medievalism is that specialist knowledge is tied to characters. So if there’s only one person in your village who knows how to brew tastier beer, and they die after being freakishly savaged by a passing wolf (it happens), suddenly your village will have no artisanal lager master. The results may be devastating. Luckily, you can share knowledge in a number of ways – by copying books, or having “wise conversations”. The exception to this is child characters, whose pea-sized brains can’t learn specialist knowledge, only soaking up basic attributes like “manners” from the teachers you assign to them. Well, until now. The developers for the Rimworld-meets-Crusader Kings catastrophe simulator have made kids a little smarter. They’ll now learn more important things from their adult teachers.

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Hello reader who is also a reader, and welcome back to Booked For The Week – our regular Sunday chat with a selection of cool industry folks about books! July has shrivelled up like a freshly laundered sock left on the radiator for too long, and yet, it’s still hot enough that even typing the word radiator makes me want to inject concentrated Solero straight into my bloodstream. With my last remaining un-fugged brain cells, I have wrenched this column back from its hiatus, and who better than to get us into the swing of things once more than Baldur’s Gate 3 lead writer and bloody RPS legend Adam Smith! Cheers Adam! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?

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I’ve never learned to drive, but every so often a well-meaning friend tells me I’d be good at it, because ‘look, Edwin, you play all those driving games, surely they’ve taught you the basics’. Friend, here is what driving games have taught me: traffic lights are there for regional flavour; drifting is the same thing as cornering; other cars exist to serve as bumper cushions when overshooting a turn. Certainly, nobody wants a guy whose ideas about automobiles come from 2018’s Wreckfest to be involved in the school run. On which note: THQ Nordic have just announced Wreckfest 2 – a fresh helping of destruction derby with fancified visuals and newly animate drivers who flinch and gesticulate when other drivers smash into them. Witness the carnage in the announcement trailer below.

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Bungie have reportedly cancelled Payback, an unannounced project in the Destiny universe from former Destiny 2 game director Luke Smith and project lead Mark Noseworthy. Both Noseworthy and Smith appear to have lost their jobs in the course of Bungie’s brutal cost-cutting this week, but Payback’s cancellation pre-dates the layoffs. Envisaged as a Destiny spin-off, rather than Destiny 3, it was apparently dropped “a while ago”.

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